Search needs your help!

To make changes to search at a quicker pace, the Search team
needs to be able to test changes before making them available
on-wiki. Discernatron is a tool that allows participants to
judge the relevance of search results. When evaluating
potential changes to the Wikimedia search the team will use
these judgements to help rate potential changes by how much
better they are at putting the most relevant articles at the
top of the search results page.

What queries am I rating?

Every month the Discovery
department loads approximately 500 randomly selected search
queries from the English Wikipedia into Discernatron for
grading. These queries represent around 0.0001% of all full
text searches on English Wikipedia. This sample is incredibly
small, but still represents a wide swath of the types of
queries received. Before being released to Discernatron, WMF
engineers review the sampled set of queries and remove anything
that could be considered personally identifiable information
(PII). Initially only queries for English Wikipedia are being
used but Discernatron will expand to other languages—such as
French, Spanish and Russian—as time goes by.

So someone is looking at all my searches?

No. When reviewing queries there is no additional meta data,
such as user name, location, or IP address. Additionally due to
the sample size it is very unlikely that the sample contains
more than one query from any single user. See Discovery's Data
access guidelines for more information on how the
department manages user data.

What kinds of queries are removed?

Anything potentially personally identifiable. This means any
kind of phone number, serial number, or non-notable address. We
remove searches for specific URLs, and names of non-notable
companies and non-notable people (those that don't have wiki
articles and aren't mentioned prominently in any other
article). For the benefit of participants most non-English
searches are also removed, as it would be hard to judge the
quality of results. Finally "junk" queries, such as
"Ikohoyugc", are removed. (These junk queries make up one to
two percent of total query volume.)